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Avatars Don’t Poop But You Can Be Sure The Metaverse Will Have Toilets
What I learned from my own years building a virtual world
“THIS IS GOING TO BE THE 3D INTERNET” a tech reporter boldly wrote. When was this claim made? Not in a 2021 tweet covering Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse, but in an early 2000’s magazine article forecasting a rosy future for the virtual world Second Life (SL). I was working there at the time, a young team member in his first startup post-grad school. As the ‘non-engineer,’ I did a little of a lot, and a lot of a little: consistently some product management work, but also tasks as diverse as writing our first community standards, negotiating the software license for a physics engine and trying to forecast when a $400 out-of-the-box Dell tower PC would be able to meet our minimum hardware spec. You emerge from experiences like these with [Liam Neeson voice] a very particular set of skills, and I’d say my nearly three years at Linden Lab, the parent company of Second Life, certainly impacted all the work I’ve done since.
Some of you might be familiar with SL but here’s the short story: there’s a historical category of ‘metaverse’ products that tend to gravitate towards the user-designed, open-ended, physical simulation attribute set. They can be centralized (‘land’ is hosted by a single company)…
